Devops Culture & How to Successfully Achieve Devops

DevOps is a software development lifecycle (SDLC) methodology designed to:

• Expedite product release cycles
• Reduce waste processes
• Improve the end-user experience with every release iteration

In addition to the tooling and processes that enable DevOps, the popular SDLC methodology is largely focused on culture, the people and their mindset. So, what is this DevOps culture everyone talks about? Let’s take a look.

(This article is part of our DevOps Guide. Use the right-hand menu to navigate.)

What is DevOps culture?

In any DevOps organization, whether it’s a single team or the entire organization, small, multidisciplinary and autonomous teams work collaboratively across the developer, QA, and Ops departments with shared responsibilities. Teams are required to focus on product quality and speed of delivery through:

• Collaborative efforts
• Automation
• Response to feedback from all stakeholders

The organization itself is also required to:

• Eliminate silos across departments
• Allow teams to operate autonomously
• Adopt governance measures and policies that facilitate autonomy and automation-driven SDLC processes

DevOps promises a system of continuous improvement through collaborative efforts of several contributing teams and individuals throughout the SDLC pipeline.

(Explore the principles and values of DevOps.)

DevOps requires cultural change

Despite the available technologies and process workflows in place, if you fail to adopt the cultural changes of DevOps, teams will likely face conflicting goals and may not be able to realize the true pace and promise of DevOps.

For instance, Devs may want to deploy new features quickly in response to end-user feedback and market demands—but the QA team may want to ensure that every release iteration is stable, secure, and performs as per intended standards.

With traditional (waterfall) SDLC models, a deadlock emerges: devs inherently regard security as a responsibility of QA, who are inclined more toward keeping systems running instead of releasing fancy new features into the market. With the DevOps mindset, however, devs take early responsibility to check in functioning code with every build iteration and working with the QA to fix potential bugs.

And to address the issues associated with performance and failures, DevOps teams focus on reducing the Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) instead of optimizing the Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF).

Let’s compare strategies:

• The former strategy allows DevOps teams to deploy multiple feature releases fast, be prepared and react quickly to reduce the impact of potential failures.
• The latter aims only to reduce potential issues. In reality, however, software issues are rarely eliminated altogether. Extra efforts toward achieving this goal compromise the pace of release cycle.